Posts Tagged ‘ Master and his Emissary ’

Demonic Machines

I have a strange obsession: I am determined to understand the world – and people in particular. People are the ones that give me the most trouble. I am convinced we have changed greatly, and we now are only partly human. But saying just what we have become has baffled me. It is clear that we have [ READ MORE ]

Rejection

Rejection has been a very big deal for me. I was rejected by my mother and I have never recovered from it. The last time I saw her, when I was nearly forty and when she was dying from cancer – she made it clear to me that as far as she was concerned I [ READ MORE ]

It’s Actually Funny When You Think About It

  • December 30th, 2011
  • Posted in Poetry

It’s funny because thinking is so useless. We made a big mistake when we decided to rely on reason to guide us through life’s murky passages. By the time we woke up to this, our situation was hopeless. We can only look on in amusement as we flounder in the mire. We can write about [ READ MORE ]

The Narrowly-Focused Mind

My mother used to tell me “You have a one-track mind.” And she was right. I still do, and that is one of my problems. But it also a problem of many other people. They are well-versed in certain areas, but ignorant of most others. McGilchrist would say their left-hemisphere (with its tendency towards specialization) [ READ MORE ]

What it Means to be a Machine

I am reading the final chapter of The Master and his Emissary, and I want to share some of it with you. Here Iain McGilchrist is dealing with a subject many, many people have dealt with – one could build a tank-trap by piling up all the books about this. (Including Lewis Mumford and his [ READ MORE ]

How Can People Not Exist?

For quite a while now, I have been obsessed with an idea that made no sense. I have put it a number of ways, but they all boil down to the fact, as I see it, that people have ceased to exist. How can any idea be any crazier than that – since I am [ READ MORE ]

Processed People

Processing was something invented by the Industrial Revolution. Raw materials are its input and uniform products are its output. The key concept here is uniformity. A race of identical persons was an idea too horrible to contemplate before industrialization, but now they are everywhere, and consider themselves perfect – which they are, in a way. But [ READ MORE ]

We No Longer Know Who We Are

We have been changing so fast we are like nothing we ever have been. We can no longer relate to ourselves because we have no words to describe what we have become. We cannot understand ourselves and don’t know what we should be doing. We have no past and no future. In a very real [ READ MORE ]

High-Tech Mental Illness

Iain McGilchrist in his book The Master and his Emissary describes the mental diseases of Industrialization, beginning on page 404. High-tech is post-industrial, but shares many of these same diseases, which are Schizophrenia Depression Anorexia nervosa Multiple personality disorder Autism Based on my experience in high-tech, or the computer/software/internet complex (CSI), I would rank these differently. I [ READ MORE ]

The Mind of a Perfect Machine

Some people actually have minds like this – and everyone else believes they do too. These are two separate topics, and I will deal with the first one first. Some programmers have such minds, and any company with any sense is desperate to hire them. Companies without any sense, by far the most numerous, are [ READ MORE ]

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 106 other followers